Jiangyu Pan

"The silent memorial"

Section MS2, Kelly Spanou

Keywords: model-making, collage, materials

On December 8th, 1994, the small city of Karamay in China's northwest Xinjiang province was home to one of the worst fire disasters in the country's history. As a result more than 300 people who were at the "Friendship Theatre" (友谊馆) were killed -288 of whom were elementary to middle school students. It was the time when Chinese government implemented the new one-child family planning policy and as a result, media were eager to erase all the traces of this catastrophic event. My project aims to criticise the way that media were manipulated by the government. I create a physical model of the entrance of the demolished "Friendship Theatre". At the background, I put newspapers of this era in order to mediate the way that media have silenced the event.